Saturday, May 10, 2008

This is my first post although I've been a member for several years. I welcome you to the 'story' of my cactus. Some transformations are more obvious than others but I am very pleased with the finished result.

Saturday, May 03, 2008

Rather like announcing your safe arrival on holiday with a postcard home ,this is my safe arrival postcard to fellow members that I have arrived safely back on the DOT scene after an absence of over 3 years due to mental illness of which I am recovering (hopefully).

Slower than I used to be but twice as keen.I am not ashamed of having a mental illness and it is true there is always a way back through the maze

Friday, May 02, 2008

Here is the story of Cactus ET as it travelled around the group.It is interesting to see fairly constant colours almost throughout and the different ways we found to distort the images.

From the original cactus photograph, I copied it, applied a gradient map and blended the 2 layers using difference mode. I replaced all the blue tones with green and cropped a square from the part of the image I felt worked best.

If anyone else would like to share how they made the transformations, just send it in a comment.

Below is the story of CactusLW and it's transformations as it went around the group.It began as a cactus, moved through pop art to misty planets, dancing eggs or a string of beads, into a very surreal jelly mould and back to cactus colours and a neat, symetrical pattern, then reverted to the blues and purples and began to twirl. I wonder if we will be able to detect individual styles by the end of this exercise?

Sometimes it is hard to work out exactly what was done to achieve a particular image, but hopefully, next time, we will all have printed sheets that tell the story of each transformation. Trying out some of the ideas on the computer as we went along highlighted things for all of us that we could learn from and explore for ourselves.

Cactus Consequences was it a game, or was it a challenge? We all started off with the same image (above), a beautiful picture of a cactus taken by Erica at Wisley. Everyone then had to make some sort of transformation to it and pass it on to the next person on the list of members. The image had a restricted size of 1mb and was to be about 10cm sq, approx 150ppi. The reason for the restriction is that not everyone in the group is on broadband (download times etc).

We each recorded what we did to the image, and sent it on as a single layered jpeg so no one could see the previous transformations and be influenced by them. Each week we passed on the images, but it soon became apparent that not everyone was sticking to the rules of engagement! We had some very interesting shpaes and sizes of image and quite a range of file formats too, which made it a little tricky for some to bring the image back in to line! It all added to the challenge though, and I think we all learnt more about how to change file sizes, ppi/dpi, layers and their implication for file sizes, and also keeping records and naming layers.

Below is my record of a transformation I made to one of the images.

Everyone had kept some sort of record of what they did and we followed one image around the group as it was transformed again and again. Whenever an image got to Erica it seemed to turn green! Chrissie was excellent at creating unusual shapes, Pat was in to pattern and Ros was keen to try out something new each time.

By listening and trying out peoples transformations on Ericas computer we all learnt things we did not know before. In fact I think we all had information overload as well!

Hopefully we will all post an image of the stages that transformed each one of our starting images into the end images that we received as they finished going around the group. Mine is still travelling at this point, but I hope to have the finished one back soon.

I am looking forward to the next one, Hilary has kindly supplied us all with another image to work on.

Thanks Erica for being our host this time, and thank you too for your origami skills!

This is the blog of the Designs On Textiles group who are a bunch of people who use the computer as a design tool for their textile work.

Welcome

Hi,

Welcome to the blog of the DOT group. This blog was designed to keep members up to date with what went on at our meetings, but if you are not a member, you are very welcome to read our posts anyway.

DOT, or Designs On Textiles was formed by a group of like minded individuals who use the computer as a design tool for their textile work. Members have a range of abilities from total beginners to old hands. Most of us are in to stitched textiles in some form, but we do have a machine knitter and a hand knitter as well. We meet once every 3 months for a day of exploration and sharing, and a good old natter.

Our base is in Nottingham, and we are all members of the Computer Textile Design Group (CTDG) which is an international version of DOT. There are other local groups around the country, so if you are interested in joining one, simply contact the CTDG for details of where to find us all. You can contact DOT by leaving a comment or emailing one of the members via this blog.